Homer

Highlights from the Archives

Telemachus and Odysseus, unlike the characters in the ''Iliad,'' are capable of change. By the end of the journey Odysseus has learned how to dissemble, supplicate and plead to stay alive, just as his son has learned how to stand up for himself. Odysseus, once his men have been drowned or killed, falls into a long and solitary despair. His journey is a kind of penance.

Dispensing with strict literalness, yet always conscious of the poem's overarching theme of heroism and its bloody consequences, Stanley Lombardo manages to be respectful of Homer's dire spirit while providing on nearly every page some wonderfully fresh refashioning of his Greek. The result is a vivid and sometimes disarmingly hard-bitten reworking of a great classic.

When Robert Fagles translates Homer, legions of earlier translators are looking over his shoulder, along with Homer himself, a lively presence from 2,700 years ago. Then there is what he refers to as ''the translation police,'' that cadre of keepers of the Homeric flame who will allow no divergence from the original.

Homer -- as much a man of twists and turns as his hero Odysseus -- has, with the Muse's help, been translated into countless varieties of English, just as he himself may have translated oral traditions into written verse. His rhythmic Greek has been turned into heroic couplets (Alexander Pope), the cryptic rhetoric that inspired Keats (George Chapman), serviceable prose that reminded one critic of Agatha Christie (E. V. Rieu), and even popular song.